


if at last you do succeed, never try again

by arealsword



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Car Racing, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Causality, Existential Dread, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Remix, Temporal Mystery, Temporal Paradox, although it’s very much MCD whoops, i need to stop doing that, now with 60 percent more remus daydreaming about seducing beethoven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29082984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arealsword/pseuds/arealsword
Summary: “The phrase you’re looking for,” says Logan, “isontological paradox.”or,underground car racing au goes off the rails, local man becomes a theoretical improbability, more at six
Relationships: Thomas Sanders & The Sides, Thomas Sanders & Thomas Sanders
Comments: 22
Kudos: 33
Collections: TSS Fanworks Collective, TSS Fanworks Collective Discord: January Remix Challenge!, Thomas Fucking Dies





	if at last you do succeed, never try again

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Need A Ride?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14453190) by [princey_pie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/princey_pie/pseuds/princey_pie). 
  * In response to a prompt by [princey_pie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/princey_pie/pseuds/princey_pie) in the [tss_fanworks_collective_discord_january_remix_challenge](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/tss_fanworks_collective_discord_january_remix_challenge) collection. 



> Remix of the fic linked above - I didn’t realize how much I loved the vibe and aesthetic of an illegal car-racing au until I read this. thank you. and of course I had to get my grubby bizarre canonverse-au hands all OVER this bad boy, which... maybe I should apologize for that. But it was fun, so I won’t. 
> 
> Title's from Robert A Heinlien's '—All You Zombies—', which isn't _exactly_ in perfect keeping with whatever this fic's about, but a lot of the themes were inspired by Heinlien's work initially, so! A Heinlien title it is, because I couldn't think of anything else to call it!
> 
> Warnings: car crashes, near-death experiences, Remus being Remus, dubious suicide.

Virgil’s circling the car, doing his usual scowl/huff/mutter-under-breath thing, and half of what he’s saying is already circling through Thomas’s bones like a litany already, so he doesn’t actually need to hear it. The other half (which he can properly hear) goes something like–

“This is stupid, _we’re_ stupid, everything about this situation is stupid, the probability of us dying in some horrible gory accident is shooting up higher and higher every time we do this and we’re going to be buried in an unmarked grave because nobody will ever know it was us that died– ”

Thomas finishes tying his shoes, and looks around their rented, possibly-illegal garage, just in case there’s something else he’s forgetting to do before he heads out for the night. “All right,” he says. “But do you have any objections to this whole thing that you maybe _haven’t_ raised before?”

Virgil drops down to his knees and starts wiggling underneath the car to check the suspension or something. “Give me five minutes,” he says, slightly muffled; echoing. “I’m sure I’ll come up with something.”

On the other side of the room, Patton’s fingers twitch, tugging at the collar of his polo shirt. He scratches his neck, adjusts his glasses. “Do you think participating in sketchy underground drag races on irregular weekend nights... makes us a bad person?”

“Eh, probably,” says Remus, peering out from beneath the chassis. “Hard to tell. Tell you what, though; it _does_ make us a cool person.”

“Great,” says Thomas, half-laughing. “Good to know my intrusive thoughts think I’m cool.”

“Oh, _no,_ ” Remus replies. “You’re still the most milquetoast motherfucker I know. The drag racing is your sole irredeemable feature, 100-Percent Rotten Tom-atoes – I’m thinking you need to take up another extremely neat hobby. I’m thinking drugs.”

“No,” says Patton.

“ _Definitely_ not,” Virgil adds, climbing out from under the car with a scowl.

“All ready,” adds Logan, leaning out of the front seat. “Unless, Virgil...?”

“No, it looks fine.” Virgil crosses his arms, falls back against the shiny red sports car they’d obtained under shady and suspicious circumstances. “I think. I assume. Nothing’s smoking and/or obviously broken, which is the best I can do – I’m an anxious wreck, not an engineer. But since obsessive checking and overchecking is the best we’ve got...”

“We’re good to go,” Thomas surmises, cutting neatly over the ramble.

“...Yeah. I _guess._ ”

Roman claps, and then claps twice more, and spins delightedly on his heel, a flare of pure joy that shivers through the room like fireworks. “Wonderful, _wonderful –_ oh, oh, what time is it? Time to go? It must be; I can practically feel the roar of the crowd rising up around us already!”

Thomas checks his phone offhandedly, and nearly drops it as he realizes he’s running late. It’s twenty minutes to the agreed-upon circuit, and a quarter to midnight by his clock. “Oh– oh _no–_ ” – and now he’s shoving his feet into his shoes and trying to find his jacket and mask – “Okay, mask– mask, here it is, what am I forgetting? I know I’m forgetting something.”

“Water bottle,” says a familiar voice in a long-suffering tone, and the object in question is being pressed into his hands, cool and weighty. “If you keel over in the middle of this race from _dehydration_ of all things, I doubt I’ll ever forgive myself.”

“–Right, right – thanks, Janus – do I have everything? Is that everything?” Frazzled, with miscellaneous objects and gear piled up in his arms so high that he can barely see over it, Thomas casts a frantic glance around the garage.

“Good luck kisses?” Patton suggests.

“Do we have _time–_ ” Virgil says, stress and thunder creeping into his voice.

“I’m sorry, but we definitely don’t have time for good luck kisses,” Logan says. “Not that that’s ever stopped us, of course, but – ”

With a roll of his eyes, Thomas waves off Remus, who’s brightened up and is currently caking on extravagant amounts of lipstick. “No, no, you’re– you’re right.” He wrenches open the passenger door, dumps everything into the seat, and says, “Come on, guys, get in– ”

Remus sighs and wipes off the lipstick, and flounces over to throw himself at Thomas in a half-embrace, half enforced-dip, and he says, “Just so you know, if you don’t win this, I’m going to kick our collective ass, and it’ll be _brutal,_ ” and he melts away into Thomas like sizzling butter.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” says Thomas, and folds up the others as they come, pulling them in and tucking them away where they fit just right, and when he’s done, he gets into the car and shuts the door.

Seatbelt; across and buckled. No sense making this even more dangerous than it has to be. AC on – it’s a hot night. He cranks the ignition and the engine starts purring like a contented cat, and keeps on purring as he pulls the car out of the garage and cuts a smooth curve onto the small side street. Radio – on, and Queen’s blaring, a shot of liquid joy all through Thomas’s body. His fingers skitter excitedly on the steering wheel.

The garage door shuts behind him, and he’s off.

*

By the time Thomas makes it to the crossway between City Centre and Miller Highway, a sizable crowd has formed. He’s a minute or two late, but that’s fine, because his opponent doesn’t seem to have showed up yet. Funny, because the Phantom doesn’t make a habit of being late, but Thomas is glad for the reprieve. Even if the large amount of chattering people and their flashing cameras and gently curling cigarettes are kind of really _deeply intimidating._

Thomas flicks off the radio, looks out at them all, and cold dread creeps through his body accompanied by an uncomfortable jittery feeling that makes his heart flutter. Aloud, he says, “Virgil, can we maybe chill? I’ve had much bigger crowds than this before, bud. I make a living out of making a fool of myself in front of millions of people on a monthly basis.”

Several thoughts race through his head, including, _yes, but there’s a difference between performing to cameras and crashing a car in real life,_ and _mask, mask, gotta put the mask on,_ and _where is he? I thought this guy was supposed to be punctual, where’s the professionalism._

He puts the mask on, makes sure it’s covering his features acceptably, and then goes out to wait for his opponent with the rest of his adoring public. Roman is openly, unabashedly loving it. Virgil is a _lot_ more tentative. The others are arranged neatly on a sliding scale between these two extremes, which means that Thomas is all sloshy inside. A water balloon filled with emotions and doubts and excitement that some five-year-old is squishing back and forth wildly. He kind of wishes a responsible adult would take the emotional water balloon away from the hypothetical five-year-old before something messy and unfortunate happens.

A man with his hoodie pulled up tight waves at him from a motorcycle, and when Thomas waves back and lets out a delighted whoop, he lets out a laugh and revs the motor, apparently in pre-emptive celebration.

He’s just about to submit to the mortifying ordeal of interacting with a bunch of people who expect him to win a car race when his hair swishes back as a sudden breeze of motion ruffles the street. He reflexively swipes it back into place, and turns to see that another car has pulled up, whisper-quiet, and drawn perfectly level with Thomas’s own car.

A sudden hush has fallen over the assembled crowd. The people immediately around Thomas jostle him and bump into him in excitement, exchanging delighted whispers with each other.

Plain black car, toned windows. Thomas doesn’t know all that much about cars and car-related terminology (obtaining the Ferrari had been a convoluted, confusing string of events), but even he knows that _this_ is a _car._ Emphasis on ‘this’ and ‘car’, because he doesn’t need to be a motor enthusiast or scientist of any sort to know that this sleek black beast is a marvel of engineering and aerodynamics. His shiny red race car seems distinctly childish in comparison. The anxiety ratchets up another notch. He starts to consider going home.

His phone buzzes. The text on-screen reads, _Ready when you are._ Unknown number – of course.

“Oh boy,” he says to himself, and then reads it out for everyone to hear, before texting back with, _Conditions?_

A beat, and then the response – _Unnecessary. Let’s get on with it._

His eyebrows go up, but he reads out the short exchange dutifully for the benefit of everyone there. Some people let out whoops of encouragement, and soon the lively mood infects the street. Someone bangs on a rubbish bin. Someone else starts shouting something in a language he doesn’t recognize, but it’s violently encouraging and soon everyone else is shouting too.

“Hey, this seems, kind of, um,” says Patton, from where he’s perching on top of Thomas’s car.

Virgil is right behind him, reading over his shoulder. “Shady? Uh, _yeah._ ”

“Pft, coward,” laughs Remus. “You’re not gonna do it. Which is to say – eeee _xactly_ what I thought you’d end up doing. You’re getting predictable in your old age, Tommy-boy.”

Thomas looks between the three of them, and opens the door to his car.

“Do _not_ do this just to prove a point to Remus,” Logan says sternly from the passenger’s seat.

“I’m _not_ doing this just to prove a point to Remus,” Thomas half-mouths and half-mutters under his breath. “Why would I do this just to prove a point to Remus– ”

“Thomas is doing this because he _wants_ to,” Janus says. “And there’s no better reason than that, really, so let’s quit arguing on the street like a man in the midst of a midlife crisis and get on with it, shall we?”

*

And then he’s in the car, and he’s casting curious glances at the car alongside them as if tilting his head just-so will let him see through the tinted glass and let him catch a glimpse of his opponent’s face.

“Focus,” says Logan. Thomas swallows, and gently reaches up to pry Virgil’s hand where he’s got a painfully tight grip on his shoulder. Now is not the time for anxiety to be strangling him.

Someone fires a gun. He doesn’t want to think about where they got the gun from or if it’s loaded or not. There’s no time. He jerks his foot off the brake, and his car lets out an almighty roar, and the lights of the street around him blur into bright streaks as him and the Phantom surge into motion, neck-and-neck.

The adrenaline rush is astounding. Any traces of worry or trepidation are gone as he grinds his foot down, pedal to the metal as far as it can possibly go, and guns forward to race, swerving neatly around buildings and through crosswalks at top speed.

He can practically _taste_ his victory as they round to the final turn, although he’s a few short inches behind the Phantom’s sleek black car. Which is why he throws himself rather recklessly into the final turn. It’s a mistake. The car skids and swerves and starts to fishtail and it’s all Thomas can do to keep from just shutting his eyes until it’s all over.

Virgil is yelling wildly contradictory and massively unhelpful advice, Patton is moaning, “Oh, I _knew_ this was a bad idea– ” and Remus is making _nyoom vroom_ noises and cackling to himself. He struggles with the wheel, cursing himself, and when the car clips the side of a building and goes airborne for a few weightless breathless moments, he’s barely surprised.

He shuts his eyes.

The landing is bone-shaking, earth-shattering. Two bounces, skid, and then the airbags inflate and he’s gasping and choking and wondering if he’s actually alive. The car has been flipped upside down; half-caved in on the passenger’s side and smoke peeling off it in great acrid-smelling waves. In the distance, sirens.

“Ow,” he says numbly.

“Agreed,” Roman says, sounding genuinely shaken. “Do you think those police cars–?”

“Very high probability of them being for us, yes,” Logan says. His voice is a bit smaller than usual, although that could be because of how he’s having to curl himself to fit right next to Thomas in the small space they have. “Or rather, for both us and our opponent, but since _we’re_ the ones that crashed– ”

“Ow,” Thomas repeats.

“Thank you, Thomas, we did get that bit–” Oh, and Janus is here too now – it’s getting crowded in here – “–now, can we please focus on the part where we get out of this situation _without_ being arrested?”

“Step one,” says Virgil. “Getting out of the car.”

Together, they manage to push the remains of the airbag away and prise open the half-twisted wreck of the door – and the moment they do, a sleek black car pulls up neatly right next to them, making barely the slightest noise as it brakes.

The door opens.

“Huh,” says Patton.

“Need a ride?” says the Phantom, except it can’t be him, because that makes _no sense,_ and there’s no possible way that the mysterious Phantom, legend of the Florida circuit racing community could be– “That’s not a question, actually. I’m telling you that you _need a ride;_ get in, come on– ”

“What the fuck,” says Janus, although he’s scrambling for Thomas’s seatbelt and shoving him towards the door. “Seriously, _what the fuck._ Thomas-?!”

“I’m going, I’m going,” Thomas gasps, out-of-breath and dizzy and maybe faintly concussed except he can’t really tell because he can’t remember having ever been properly concussed before. Maybe he is and he’s hallucinating or something, that’d definitely explain what he’s seeing. He lurches out the door, catches himself on the warped frame of his broken-beyond-repair car to steady himself.

“Here,” says Roman, and grabs his hand to pull him around to the other side of the sleek black car, except it isn’t _his_ Roman. The contact doesn’t feel right, the visual is ever-so-slightly _off,_ and even as he collapses into the passenger seat, he can already tell why. Roman slams the door shut behind him and sinks out with a wink and a wave and he’s overcome with another wave of dizziness.

“Where are we going?” Thomas asks, trying to buckle his seatbelt on and then giving it up as a completely lost case and hoping that the statistical improbability of being involved in two car crashes in one night is enough to save him.

Virgil, crammed in right next to Thomas with an arm flung wildly around one of his shoulders and his bent knee pressed against the door, says, “Also, why are you _us?_ ”

The other Thomas, in the driver’s seat, slams his foot down on the pedal and spins them out of the street and onto the back roads. It’s like looking into a mirror. It’s like looking into a mirror, but _more_ than usual. He looks exactly the same, albeit with different clothes and no mask hanging loosely around his neck. Maybe a bit more confident. It’s uncanny. “Would you believe, _convoluted time travel accident_?” he asks with just a hint of wry humor.

“ _God_ no,” says Logan from the back seat, scientifically horrified.

“ _God_ yes,” exclaims Remus from right next to him, absolutely delighted.

“How long?” says Patton, eyes widening. “...Are you from the future, I mean? Or are you past-us, and we’re just– ”

“Unless you believe you’ve developed a spontaneous case of amnesia pertaining to the past few weeks, we’d need to be,” says Logan – another Logan. Other Thomas’s Logan. Although, if it’s time travel, then he’s _going_ to be Thomas’s Logan – this is giving him even more of a headache. “Two weeks ago, approximately. But only relatively.”

“ _Time travel?”_ shrieks Roman, hands leaping up to clutch both sides of his head.

“You’re the Phantom for the next few weeks,” says the other Thomas. “Have fun.”

“I’m the – I’m the _what?_ We’re the _what?_ You’re – what? _What?_ Where are we going, is this – why are you driving us to Equinox Bridge?”

Because that’s exactly where they’re going. And the way that the other Thomas is cutting them directly through traffic, causing other cars to honk and screech and the drivers to yell and curse at them is _not_ very encouraging. Not at all.

“Hey, not that I haven’t always wanted to drive directly off a bridge just to see what’ll happen,” Remus begins, a bit too casually.

“ _Death!_ ” Virgil shrieks. “What will happen is _death!_ Dude, stop the car before we – ”

With a wink and a shout of laughter that makes Thomas’s skin tingle all over, his future-self wrenches open the car door and goes tumbling out – just before the car hits the point of no return, and just before they tumble right off the edge of the bridge and into a miasma of spiralling, fractalizing orange light.

Thomas screams. So does everyone else. The sensation of weightless, uncontrolled freefall is sickening, dizzying–

*

–and then _impact,_ but it’s a much softer impact than he’d expected it to be.

“Sorry,” says Logan flatly, glasses flashing in the sudden onslaught of sunlight all around them. “What the _fuck?_ ”

They’re in a parking lot, just across from that one park with the duckpond that he sometimes passes on his morning walk. It had been nearly midnight when Thomas had set off, not even half an hour ago. Now, it’s so very clearly early morning.

“That was _me,_ ” says Thomas, blank. “I just – I just talked to _me._ I mean, I know I’m always talking to me, but– ”

“Can we– should we go home?” Patton tries, and then, more desperately, “I _want_ to go home. Let’s go home.”

“Time travel,” mutters Roman. “ _Time travel._ ”

*

The keyring has an address hanging off it; an address that Thomas doesn’t recognize, but in familiar handwriting. When he tries to use his phone to get directions, it just doesn’t turn on, like the trip through the rift has completely fried it somehow.

So he has to do it the old-fashioned way.

Fortunately, there’s an old weathered road map in the trunk of the Phantom’s car – or, gosh, okay, _his_ car now – and at least part of him is smart enough to work out how to get to the place in question. It’s a pleasant little nondescript flat tucked in the middle of town. It’s nothing fancy, really _,_ but the fridge is stocked and the garage is fully functional.

For the next two weeks, he challenges people all around the city to race upon race, and wins every single one. Of course he does. The Phantom had been one of his biggest inspirations for doing the whole underground drag-race thing to start with, he knows these races and routes inside and out – and most importantly, he knows he’s going to win, because he’s already seen it happen. That knowledge doesn’t stop Logan frowning and hypothesizing about casualty loops and bootstrap paradoxes, and it certainly doesn’t stop Virgil from practically strangling him every time he comes close to losing or running off the road again.

And when the day is right, he challenges _himself_ to a race, knowing the outcome even more intimately than usual. He’s fashionably late; mysterious and cool, and when the gun fires and he and himself go spinning off wildly down the road, the adrenaline rush is dizzying. It’s an even greater experience, somehow, now that he knows who he’s competing against. He pushes as hard as he can, and every voice in the back of his head is cheering and whooping and yelling advice and encouragement that blurs and blends into a constant stream of white noise and static.

He watches himself go off the road, flip twice, land with a crunch and a bang. He winces in sympathy, the memory of a headache echoing through him, and goes to loop around the nearest block before pulling up cleanly next to the wreck of his previous car.

“Need a ride?” he asks before he’s even aware he’s doing it, and Roman peels off from him to give past-him a hand, and then he’s trying to remember where the rift is and pretty much answering all of the inevitable, predestined questions on autopilot as he guns it away from the approaching police sirens.

Left, right, left. Straight across the intersection, nevermind the traffic lights. The bridge is right up ahead. Thomas winks and laughs and throws himself out of the car with a burst of energy he doesn’t even have to fake. He bruises his shoulder and jars his ribs as he completely fails to land properly or safely, and rolls onto his side to watch the car, with his younger self in it, disappear into the orange brightness.

He falls back to the ground, and huffs out a shaky breath. “Whoof. That’s one way to get the ol’ heart pounding.”

Janus helps him up, and Patton dusts him off, and then they all stand there at the railing, staring at the bright orange rift of light just above the highway that literally nobody else seems to be able to see. At the very least, nobody seems to be panicking and/or screaming about it, so.

“How long has that been _there?_ ” Virgil mutters, squinting, but nobody really has an answer for him, so they let it hang in the air between them.

“So,” says Roman, very slowly. “What... what _now?_ ”

“Good question,” says another Thomas, who is standing right behind them, bundled up in a warm, puffy sweater.

Thomas nearly falls off the bridge. Remus actually _does_ fall off the bridge, with a comical screech and a cartoonish whistling-noise and horrific screech of pain, but he’s only doing that for comedic effect.

“You have got to be kidding me,” is Janus’s opinion. “ _Again?_ How far does this go?”

Other-Thomas shrugs, an apologetic half-smile tugging at his lips. “...Turtles all the way down, apparently. Come on, I’ve got a car for you guys.”

*

The car is light blue and round in a pleasant, old-fashioned sort of way, and clearly not meant for serious racing. Or any racing at all, come to think of it. It sits, comfortably nestled between the monster of a delivery truck behind it and the brick wall of the office building right in front of it – innocuous; unobstructive.

“Yo, are we cycling through everyone’s aesthetics the further down we get?” Remus says. “And if so, when are we getting to mine? I want a monster truck.”

Another Remus peers out from behind other-Thomas, and pulls a face. “Eh, no dice – haven’t got a monster truck. Not yet.”

Thomas’s Remus groans and huffs. “Aww, fuck me in the ass with a frozen pineapple.”

“You’ve got to drive it into the rift, again,” other-Thomas explains, ignoring both Remuses. “Right off the bridge, you know the drill. Address is on the keys, keep out of the way of your previous two go-arounds, um – I feel like I should be mentioning something else here – ”

Thomas nods along vaguely, and then shakes his head. “Okay, wait. Stop. That’s – what are we even _doing?_ ”

“Um,” says other-Thomas. “Telling you what you need to do so you don’t cause a horrible reality-breaking paradox?”

“No, not – ” Thomas drags a hand through his hair, tugging hard. “ _All_ of this! Why are we cycling through cars? Why are we doing car-racing stuff in the first place? I’m guessing that at some point, we end up giving ourselves that Ferrari, and that’s fine, but, but – literally, why are we even _doing_ this?” He takes in a very, very deep breath as something dreadful occurs to him. “And. When is it going to _stop?_ ”

The other-Thomas doesn’t look too surprised to be having this conversation, and Thomas guesses it’s probably because he’s already been on the other end of it. It’s hard to get annoyed or passionate when you know exactly what the other person’s going to say, having already said it yourself. “You think _I_ know that? I’m only one loop further along than you are.”

“You’re saying that there’s _more_ loops?”

“Well, I don’t know that,” other-Thomas says. “This could be the last one, for all I know. I just need to go through it first.”

But he doesn’t sound very confident. Not at all.

“All right, what are we doing this time?” Thomas asks, resigned. “It doesn’t look like we’re going to be doing much racing, so – ”

“You’ll figure it out,” says other-Thomas, and tosses Thomas the keys. He catches them and watches, irritated, as the admittedly pretty attractive figure of himself walks away into the night.

He kind of actually hates himself.

“Guys,” says Patton. “I’ve just realized. I don’t think talking to ourself is going to get us anywhere.”

“You’re only realizing that _now?_ ” Logan says incredulously.

*

Thomas drives the blue car to the bridge in complete silence, and when a free spot in traffic opens up, they go plunging off the side of the road and into the rift, which seems smaller this time. More compact, maybe. When daylight explodes all around them, they’re parked off the side of the road in a quieter part of the suburbs, idling gently – apparently no worse for wear from the jump.

“This makes no sense,” says Janus.

“You’re telling me,” says Virgil, who is apparently having a very small, very contained all-out panic attack in the back seat. He’s kindly keeping it numbed down for Thomas’s sake, which Thomas deeply appreciates it. Or maybe Thomas is just dissociating so hard that he can’t feel his own emotions anymore. That seems equally likely.

“No, it _physically and rationally_ doesn’t make sense,” Janus continues.

“Are you talking about the car thing?” asks Patton. “Like, if these cars keep going back through the rips and getting circled around and around and passed back and forth between – _Thomases,_ I guess?”

“How are they all not completely wrecked and broken from however-many loops it’s been through?” Thomas says. “Yeah, um. I got nothing.”

“The phrase you’re looking for,” says Logan, “is _ontological paradox._ ”

Thomas blinks. “Um. Is it?”

“Bootstrap paradox,” Logan offers, and then at a similarly blank look, “the Beethoven’s Time-Traveller paradox? Is there-?”

“Oh, ooh, actually, I know _this_ one,” says – of all people – _Remus._

There’s a very long silence, and then Janus says, “Well, now I _need_ to hear this.”

“So. You’re Beethoven’s biggest fan,” says Remus, which is a pretty tame start, all things considered. “You love the guy to death. Have all of his music, know every bit of it, would fuck him if you could; the works.”

“Whoa, whoa, _whoa,_ ” objects Virgil. “Fucking Beethoven was never on the table, here!”

Remus waves this aside. “Fortunately for your Beethoven-fucking agenda, you have a time machine. So one day you're like, 'let's go, gonna get it on with my favorite classical composer!', and you hop in that time machine and you're off to the peak of his career, time-wise.”

“Is this– ” Patton asks, side-eying Logan.

“Surprisingly coherent, yes.”

“But when you get there, Beethoven is not there, and, hey, nobody you meet has even heard of the guy. It's like he never existed! You’re confused and horny, but then you say to yourself – you’re an old white man in this scenario, I should have specified – you say to yourself, 'well, I look exactly like Beethoven and also, I have all of his music here with me because I wanted the dude to paint his signature on it in– ’”

“ _Stop._ ”

“ –so you become Beethoven.”

“I– ” Thomas has been having trouble following this. “I do _what._ ”

Logan nods. “And you live out the rest of your life as him.”

“And the only Beethoven-fucking you’re gonna get done tonight is masturbation,” Remus chips in with a saucy wink in Thomas’s direction.

“The question _being_ ,” continues Logan, a little louder, “who wrote Beethoven’s fifth? It certainly couldn’t have actually been the man, because he never existed, but it had to come from somewhere, otherwise–”

“Otherwise you'd never have been able to develop a crush on the dude in the first place,” Virgil mutters.

Thomas looks back and forth between Logan, Remus and Virgil for a long, long moment. “Okay. I didn’t need to know, like, half of that. So, how is the car surviving? Is there, like, a scientific explanation, or – ”

“The point is that there most likely isn’t one,” says Logan. “It’s a figurative chicken-and-egg situation.”

“Oh, _good,_ ” drawls Janus. “I’m so glad we just wasted an entire five minutes of our collective lives on that very important tangent, then.”

“So what are we doing first?” Patton asks.

Thomas holds up the keys. “Well, we have an address. And he– I– whatever– said I’d have to work it out. So it can’t be _that_ hard.”

It isn’t. The address leads to a tiny flat on the top floor of a depressing-looking building, and in that flat is a lot of maps and address books and burner phones, and a list of fairly concise instructions written on a fresh notepad next to the tiny desk. Apparently he has to _organize_ all of these races and routes. He’d never put much thought into the how and who of the whole underground racing thing, but as it turns out, he’s been secretly behind it all along. Delightful.

Considering he’s basically done all of them, twice over, it isn’t the _hardest_ of jobs (and he’s worked customer service, so it’s genuinely an upgrade, especially since he doesn’t have to interact with anyone face-to-face) but it’s not exactly pleasant, either. He misses his friends, his family. He wishes he could just go _home,_ but home is occupied. Occupied by him. It’s both weird and unpleasant to think about.

*

In the next loop, he doesn’t drive a monster truck, but it _is_ a massive roaring gas-guzzling giant of a Jeep that he’s very glad that he’s already got quite a bit of money for the gas bills. He remembers hearing about it on the outskirts of the post-race conversations, vaguely, and although he doesn’t end up winning all that often on this loop, it’s the most fun he’s had in a while. He knows that Remus is unironically having the time of his life. He’s pretty sure everyone else is too, judging by how cohesive his emotions feel.

He’s found, through systematic visits to the bridge whenever he has the chance, that the rift only shows up at midnight on-the-dot. It fizzles into existence with a burst of starlight and vibrant orange, writhing outwards – the size of a grown man, with roughly the same height and width, too. He doesn’t know how long it lasts for _after_ that, because he’s never managed to wait it out. Because he’s always scheduled, by a future loop of himself, to travel back through it to the beginning of the two weeks. And speaking of which–

Crashing the Jeep off the side of the bridge is even more satisfying than he thought it’d be. Hitting the rift is more difficult. As the minutes progress (in the time where it exists), it seems to dwindle, growing smaller and smaller. He’s not quite sure what to think of that.

*

The next time round, he’s got a small rusty-purple minivan and a hotel room that makes Janus complain about health and safety standards, and he’s tasked by future-him to obtain the funds that he’s been using for all these loops.

“I’d say it’s nothing illegal,” says his future-self, “but, uh– ”

“Why not,” sighs Thomas, and accepts the keys. “My life’s already so goddamn weird anyway; let’s add drug running to the list. At least my intrusive thoughts will respect me.”

“It’s funny,” says the other Thomas, with a humorless little laugh. “That’s exactly what I thought you’d say.”

It’s not the _worst_ thing he’s ever done, really. No, all right – it kind of is the worst thing he’s ever done, morally speaking, but at least... there’s probably an ‘at least’ in there, right? Probably.

At least he’s still alive.

At night, he curls up in the corner of a mattress that’s probably riddled with bedbugs (which is actually the least of his problems right now) and tries not to feel too sorry for himself. There’s probably people out there who have it worse than him.

“What have I said about minimizing your own problems in context of everyone else’s?” sighs Janus, and crawls up next to him to throw a warm heavy arm over his body. “Stop thinking so loud; you’ll wake the whole building.”

“If you hog the covers, I’m pushing you out the window,” an exhausted-looking Virgil warns Remus, who just laughs, and pushes Patton into the wall so he has more space to sprawl out.

Crammed together with himself on a tiny motel bed, he’s a very long way away from anything even remotely resembling contentment. But it’s nice, just to breathe for a bit. To press his face into Roman’s shoulder and tangle his fingers with Patton’s and just _be._

*

A version of himself whose smile is just a little _too_ stiff and fixed gives him a motorbike, old but still functional, with a classy pattern of bright yellow swirling motifs all along the body. He’s thrown back further than he’s ever gone before, spiralling through orange and ozone to land nearly a month-and-a-half prior to the rift’s appearance.

At first, it isn’t immediately clear what he’s meant to do this time. Not until he finds the garage where the motorbike is parked. Because right next door to it, there’s a shiny red Ferrari with a ‘for sale’ sign neatly taped to the inside of the windscreen. A very _familiar_ red Ferrari, down to the licence plate.

“We have enough leftover money,” Logan says with a frown tugging at his lips as he checks their funds (aka the battered wallet that Thomas had stuffed all excess cash from the last go-around into and carried along with him, just in case). “But...”

“This car is what started it all,” says Thomas, peering out the windows of the garage. “If someone hadn’t given it to me and pushed me into it, I never would’ve taken up the whole racing thing. And... I guess _I’m_ that someone.”

Complete silence as Thomas processes this properly.

“So,” Roman tries, hesitant. “So we’ve got to buy it? To, you know, complete the loop. Make a circle. Another circle. There are _so_ many circles right now.”

“Or not,” Janus suggests, side-eyeing Thomas with that particular look of his that he gets whenever he’s making it really, really obvious that he knows exactly what Thomas wants and how to get it done. “If you don’t give yourself the car, none of this will have ever happened. And I _know_ you don’t want it to have happened.”

“That’s...” Thomas winces. “Well, I... I don’t know. I don’t know if I should. Wouldn’t that be a bad thing to do?”

“It’s not a crime to be selfish,” points out Janus.

“But it is a crime to disrupt the entirety of the space-time continuum and kill everyone in the known universe,” Patton counters. “Or, if it isn’t, it... _probably_ should be?”

“We don’t know if that’ll actually happen,” says Thomas weakly. “Um. Logan...?”

“I’m your logic, not a temporal physicist,” Logan says, rather severely. He straightens his glasses. “Which is to say: unlikely, but not entirely impossible.”

Thomas shuts the window and sits down heavily on the garage floor. “Oh, great,” he says.

“I mean, it’s kind of... up to you, right?” Roman says, looking around hurriedly at everyone else, as if they’re going to object to this statement. “Your paradox, your rules. Or whatever it’s meant to be.”

“And hey, look at it this way,” advises Remus brightly. “If you’re _wrong,_ it’s not like anybody’s going to be around to chew you out for fucking up!”

“I am deeply cheered,” retorts Thomas, and gets up to stare out of the window again.

God, he hates that car. He wonders if the satisfaction gained by buying it just to take a sledgehammer to it and completely wreck it into a million-million pieces would be worth all the damage done to the timeline in the process. Probably not, but he can dream.

*

Thomas buys the car. Instead of engaging in wanton destructive self indulgence, he drives it to the first garage, and leaves a series of totally-not-sketchy-at-all notes for himself to follow along with.

He spends the rest of that loop riding around the outskirts of town and watching all of his greatest racing hits from the outside looking in. His younger self looks so happy; so impressively confident behind his shiny red mask. It makes Thomas feel weirdly old – especially so as he waves to himself from the edges of the final midnight street race, and receives a whoop of delight that coaxes a reluctant smile from him.

“Isn’t this the bit where you tell me it was the right thing to do?” he asks Patton as they watch himself and himself shoot off into the night, and into the rest of the paradox that his life has become.

“Probably,” says Patton, somewhat myopically. “I mean, it _feels_ right. But it also feels wrong. You know?”

“So what is it? Is it the right thing or the wrong thing?” Thomas turns to the others, appealing. “Guys? Anyone?”

Janus just shrugs. “I’ll let you know if we ever figure it out. I think right now, we might just be clinically depressed.”

Thomas thinks about this for a moment.

“Yeah,” he says, “that tracks.” He looks down at the motorbike. “Come on, we should go. We’ve got another loop to complete tonight.” 

*

After he hands the motorbike off to his previous iteration and smiles his way through yet another infuriating, exhausting conversation he knows the ebb and flow of _far_ too well, he expects to meet another one himself. He watches himself go off the edge, and into the rift and into the past, and keeps an eye out. Another him, another car, another layer of the onion to act out. But there’s nobody.

He sits on the edge of the bridge railing, hands tucked firmly under the bars to keep himself anchored in place, and looks out on the sea of cars and traffic just below him. The light of the rift catches his face.

“This might be it, right?” Patton says, folding his arms on the railing and resting his chin on them.

“Where we get out? Of the loops?” Thomas shrugs. “Maybe? I hope so.”

He thinks about the fact that this is the furthest point they’ve come, temporally-speaking. He is further into the future than any of his previous selves have managed to make it. He wonders how old he is now, cumulatively speaking. His physical age no longer lines up with his legal age; how about that.

“It feels wrong to just, you know – _leave_ the rift there,” Virgil mutters. “Or whatever it is. What if someone else falls in?”

“It doesn’t look like anyone else can see it,” Janus points out. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

There’s a tug in Thomas’s gut that won’t leave him alone and an aching that rests somewhere deep, deeper than his bones. It’s been there since approximately the second go-around – growing. Festering. He leans forward, and then rocks back, still keeping himself braced. He keeps his eyes on the rift, waiting. Waiting for what? He’s not sure. Not yet.

The rift flickers and convulses, and then it raises its head to look at him. It has a head to raise. It has two arms and two legs and a humanoid form about his size.

“Has it,” begins Janus, and then stops, and then starts again. “Has it _always_ been like that?”

It hasn’t, and he already knows that, because they all already know it.

“Oh no,” says Thomas, which feels like an understatement of the most grievous sort.

“You’re not a theoretical physicist,” Logan tells him, “and by extension, neither am I. But...”

“But,” says Thomas.

“But we _have_ watched an awful lot of time travel-themed media. And if I were to make a guess – ”

Thomas doesn’t want to hear this, all of a sudden. “Logan...”

“Hey,” says Roman, leaning forward. His face is alight with something like horror and something like fascination. “Not to interrupt this nerdfest or anything, but don’t you think that rift is starting to look a lot like, well – us?”

He is slightly late to the party, because half of Thomas had already realized this several minutes ago. And the longer Thomas looks at it, the more he realizes that it’s less _him_ and more like an absence of him. He can feel it, itching under his skin. It’s a gap in reality that needs to be occupied. The energy building up in the air is astounding – an accumulation of pressure as time strains itself to be fixed.

“This rift,” Remus intones gravely. “It was _made_ for me.”

“Can we please take this seriously?” Janus begs, a hint of panic entering his voice. “You’re not seriously saying that you’re going to, to, throw yourself headfirst into a glowing orange orb just because you think it _wants_ you to? Thomas – ”

“I don’t _want_ to,” Thomas points out. “But, like... it’s– I don’t know how to describe it.”

“Pile up enough ontological paradoxes on top of each other, and you’re going to break something,” says Logan. “And as it turns out, that _something_ just so happens to be _reality._ ” A deep breath. “Portals in time and space don’t just form out of nothing.”

“Just, um, hypothetically,” says Roman, staring at the rift, which is beginning to shake. “How much energy would it take to create something like this?”

“I don’t _know,_ ” Logan snaps back, half-exhausted and half-hysterical. “I keep telling you; I don’t know – I’m just guessing.”

“But if you had to guess–”

“If I _had_ to guess,” says Logan. “If you held me at gunpoint and forced me to give you an on-the-spot answer with no prior research and only the evidence at hand... I would say, approximately one entire human.”

Silence.

Virgil makes a face. “Okay, but – fuck predestination, though?

On the one hand, Thomas agrees, like, a _lot._ Fuck predestination. This isn’t how he wants to go out. But on the other hand, that feeling in his chest, the aching sensation of _there’s somewhere else I should be_ is growing stronger and stronger.

“Logic dictates that we shouldn’t be so hasty to throw ourselves away like this, with no full picture of what’s going on,” Logan says quietly. “But on the other hand– ”

“On the other hand,” says Remus thoughtfully. “It feels right.”

“Does it?” Janus demands. “Does it _really?_ ” 

Patton’s gaze flickers back and forth between the rift and the rest of them. “Look, I... we don’t know what’s going to happen if we don’t, um– ”

“Die,” Remus supplies bluntly. 

“– go into the rift. Do we?”

“It would mean that the entire paradox would negate, or possibly collapse.” Logan is now leaning heavily on the bridge railing, staring at the increasingly Thomas-shaped gap in reality with something like desperate hunger in his eyes. 

“That could throw us back to the beginning of this,” Janus says, rather desperately. “We’d never have been sucked into this whole _time loop_ business to begin with. That’s the best-case scenario, isn’t it? That’s what we want!”

Thomas isn’t so sure that it _is_ what he wants, though. 

“Or,” says Roman, “it could kill literally everything and everyone on the planet.”

Virgil frowns, a deep slash of a scowl etching itself into his face. “So either we, I don’t know, _sacrifice_ ourselves to a time vortex or whatever, or we don’t do that, and everybody on earth, including us, dies anyway?”

“We _can’t_ take that risk,” Patton says, sounding close to tears. 

The tug is growing stronger. 

“Please don’t tell me that you’re all in favor of Thomas throwing himself headfirst off a bridge,” Janus says, but his voice is thready and weak, exhaustion draining at him. It’s barely a protest.

Patton grits his teeth and shakes his head, and is silent for a very long moment and then says, “I… yes. I think I am. But for the right reasons.”

“It’s only logical,” says Logan.

Remus just shrugs. “You know I’ve always been in favor of _that._ ” 

“It’s – I mean, it’s the heroic thing to do,” Roman says. 

Virgil bites his lip. “If we don’t… I think something _worse_ might happen.”

There’s really not much more to say. 

“Love you guys,” Thomas says, ignoring any last-minute thoughts or fears or feelings of trepidation in favor of that feeling of _leave, now –_ and lets himself be tugged into place with the swiftness of a falling star and the surety of the planets aligning.

And he is and always has been and always will be and always always always always always—

*

_– and just after midnight on Saturday evening, a very strange set of events took place. Eyewitnesses claim that, within the space of less than an hour, seven disparate vehicles drove, one-by-one, off the side of Equinox Bridge. Due to the extraordinary number and variety of these claims, authorities cordoned off the scene and conducted a thorough search for evidence of wreckage, but could find nothing to suggest any such incidents had occurred._

_In other news, investigations into the abrupt and mysterious disappearance of local influencer and social media personality, Thomas Sanders, are ongoing. Anyone that has information pertaining to–_

*

The rift flickers once, twice –

– then sputters and dies and is gone, all without a trace.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr at sometimes-love-is-enough for more absurdity and more of Thomas fucking dying, as is my brand at this point.


End file.
